Field Signal · Curated Reading
The Engineering
Signal.
High-signal field notes, architecture teardowns, and engineering writing from 50 publications. A focused reading queue for becoming a stronger end-to-end engineer. Updated 19 Aug.
ScyllaDB vs Aerospike, Wide-Column vs. Key/Value
Wide-column flexibility doesn’t have to come at the expense of performance -- see where the two models differ, where each one wins, and why you no longer have to choose
Meta’s AI Storage Blueprint at Scale
Over the past several years, model capabilities and training dataset sizes have experienced exponential growth. During the past year or so, the time between new-frontier-model releases has gone down from months to weeks. Reliable and fast access to storage is important to both the speed and computat...
Cutting P99 Latency 1000X During Connection Storms by Hardening ScyllaDB Admission Control
ScyllaDB successfully mitigated performance-degrading connection storms by optimizing caching, throttling, and password hashing to achieve a 1000x reduction in tail latency
10 Years of Meta’s Commitment to Python
This year marks Meta’s 10th consecutive year as a sponsor of the Python Software Foundation (PSF), the charitable organization dedicated to advancing, supporting, and protecting the open-source Python programming language and the community that sustains it. Python is one of the world’s m...
How ScyllaDB’s Trie-Based Index Delivers Up to 3X More Throughput
By transitioning from separate summary and index files to a prefix tree, we optimized cache efficiency, reduced disk I/O, and reduced memory overhead
ScyllaDB 2026.2: DynamoDB Streams and Vector Search, Trie Indexes, and Strongly Consistent Tables
ScyllaDB 2026.2 brings a combination of GA new features, exciting experimental features, and multiple stability and external use case improvements.
Privacy-Aware Infrastructure in the AI-Native Era: An Asset Classification Case Study
Privacy controls — systems that enforce retention, access, allowed-purpose, downstream-sharing, or anonymization policies — require a reliable understanding of data to function. Before such a control can operate effectively, it must know exactly what it is looking at. This can be complex, as ...
One Postgres cluster, many apps
Yo, I heard you liked databases, so we put logical databases in your database cluster so you can database while you database
Riding the Raft to Strong Consistency in ScyllaDB
How ScyllaDB is using per-tablet Raft groups to bring strong consistency to data, without sacrificing the parallelism that makes it fast
How Meta Engineered Ultra-Narrow Batteries for AI Glasses
Smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta Vanguards need to pack enough energy to power features like cameras, speakers, AI workloads, and even a display. But it all has to fit into the glasses’ temple arms. So how do you place a battery with enough power to run a pair of smart glasses [.....
Automate ScyllaDB X Cloud Clusters with Terraform
The ScyllaDB Cloud Terraform provider gives you infrastructure-as-code control over your clusters.
The feedback loops behind Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a framework for feedback controllers: write down what you want, observe what exists, make the next change, and repeat.
See what your database is doing right now with Connections
Connections lets you monitor and manage all active connections to Postgres and Vitess databases. See active sessions, identify locking patterns, and keep debugging even when normal application connections are exhausted.
ScyllaDB Customer Experience Spotlight: Faisal Saeed
Meet Faisal Saeed, Principal Customer Engineer on the Customer Experience team here at ScyllaDB.
The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE
Large DELETEs add work instead of reclaiming it. Structure your database so deletion becomes DROP TABLE or TRUNCATE.
ScyllaDB Operator 1.21 Release — with Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) Support
Introducing Oracle Kubernetes Engine support, stronger TLS, and a lighter dependency footprint
Using Salting to Lower Latency for Large Blobs in ScyllaDB
A modified salting technique that cuts P99 write latency 22x for large blobs
Dear cqlsh: Your dependencies were killing us (P.S. We rewrote you in Rust)
A story of rewriting cqlsh in Rust…with Claude Code and a lot of planning Dear cqlsh, I vouched for you. I told the team you were fine. I forked you, catered to you, vendored your dependencies and your dependencies’ dependencies. I patched things upstream that I knew you would never merge. I p...
ScyllaDB Customer Experience Spotlight: Tyler Denton
Welcome to the first installment of a new blog series introducing some of the experts you’re likely to encounter when you work with ScyllaDB. Let's get to know Tyler Denton, a Solutions Architect on the Customer Experience team here at ScyllaDB.
Egress problems and where to find them
Reducing the size and frequency of requests to your database has the double benefit of making your applications faster and cheaper.
Problem solving with PlanetScale Insights
The best way for you and your agents to see how your database actually performs in production.
Transparency in benchmarking
Transparent database benchmarks help customers make better decisions and push vendors to build better products.
On benchmarking
Benchmarking is hard. Done wrong it is very misleading, and unfortunately it is frequently done wrong. Let's explore how not to make silly mistakes.
RLS sounds great until it isn't
PostgreSQL's Row Level Security sounds like a clean way to enforce access control at the database layer, but the foot-guns, pooling incompatibilities, and performance traps often make it more trouble than it's worth.
Toolchain Horizons: Exploring Rust Dependency-Toolchain Compatibility
I tested the top 100 Rust crates on crates.io for backwards compatibility. Then I removed every dependency from the TigerBeetle Rust client and backported it to Rust 1.39, from 2019.